The Bison Range

Today we explored the Bison Range, formerly known as the National Bison Range, near Missoula. The area was established as the National Bison Range in 1908. Today it is known simply as the Bison Range and is managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.Smoke from nearby wildfires settled unevenly across the landscape. One valley was so hazy that the mountains on the opposite side were barely visible, while another looked almost clear. It was a reminder that mountains create their own weather—and even their own smoke patterns.

As the smoke shifted, I found myself looking beyond the wildlife to the landscape itself. On one mountainside, I noticed a series of horizontal lines etched into the hills as though someone had drawn contour lines with a ruler. Those “bathtub rings” are ancient shorelines. Fifteen to eighteen thousand years ago, this entire valley lay beneath Glacial Lake Missoula, a lake so enormous it stretched more than 200 miles across western Montana. When an ice dam failed, the lake drained catastrophically, helping carve many of the dramatic landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

Thousands of years later, this same valley played another important role in history. By the late 1800s, American bison had nearly disappeared. Members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes helped preserve one of the last remaining herds, and in 1908 the National Bison Range was established as one of the nation’s first wildlife refuges dedicated to saving the species.

Today, the range also protects one of the finest remaining examples of native intermountain bunchgrass prairie in North America. Seeing descendants of those rescued bison grazing these native grasslands made it easy to imagine what much of this landscape once looked like. Knowing that so much of the prairie is still native drew me to photograph the landscape itself as much as its wildlife.

At one point we noticed several mammals on a distant hillside that clearly weren’t bison. Regis raised his binoculars while I zoomed in with my camera.

“Elk,” he declared.

“Deer,” I replied.

We debated it for several minutes until later, an animal walked into a nearby stream where we could see it clearly. It was definitely an elk. Regis graciously conceded that the animals on the hillside were deer.

It’s amazing to think that a place once buried beneath an Ice Age lake later became one of the places that helped rescue an iconic American species from extinction. As much as I enjoyed photographing the bison, I found myself equally drawn to the native prairie that makes this landscape whole.